Review

Order through chaos. Beauty through noise. Full of Hell have a knack for taking these series of seemingly contradictory statements and melding them into one cohesively formulated sound. Having been keeping to the peripheries of the scene, with a 7” and a couple noise mixtapes, Full of Hell have been patiently cultivating and maturing their sound for a couple years now. Their debut album, Roots Of Earth Are Consuming My Home, utilize elements that would normally send any regular fan of music to the corner of the room, cowering in fear, hands pressed against ears. Feedback and electronic screeches emanates constantly throughout the album. Opening track “Pile Of Dead Horses” baptizes the listener with a heavily distorted howl of amps that revert back from banshee screams to lower growls, almost as if the turntable it was playing on was suddenly stopped and replayed, but a buildup of feedback and a snare count signifies the beginning of Roots Of Earth… commencing the destruction to begin.

Stylistically speaking, Full of Hell plays a conglomeration of all things heavy in the extreme music scene. Revolving from repeatedly pounded low-end chords (“Endless Drone”), to straight up methodically executed hardcore doom (“Rat King”), Roots Of Earth… is extremely diverse in the sonic punishment it dishes out. Citing acts like His Hero Is Gone, Eyehategod, Noothgrush, and Obituary, Full of Hell cling tightly to their influences on this album and it shows constantly throughout. Whether you find yourself a fan of crust, dark hardcore or noisecore, Full of Hell carries it all in spades. The album climaxes in the buildup track “The White Mare”, essentially a collection of buzzing and feedback, coupled with an almost zombie like groaning and wailing in the background, before erupting into the doom track “The Dregs of Pluto”: featuring a split between blackened hardcore yells and death metal grunts. There’s just so much variation and styles of music at work in Roots of Earth… that it’s difficult to pin Full of Hell into any solid tag: it would ultimately come up short. With a vocalist who spits venom that ranges from a Chris Colohan scream, to a Darthrone wail (“Roots Of Earth Are Consuming My Home”), Roots of Earth… travels an eleven track ride of all types of different genres and scenes.

Yet the truth of the matter is that Full of Hell is still extremely young. What makes this so truly special is that Roots Of Earth Are Consuming My Home is only their debut album. For being such a new band with so much anger and ferocity that borderlines on manic, it makes one wonder just how far this band is capable of going in the future. While their debut album might serve as a melting pot of several out-of-the-hat sounds rather than a uniquely individual album, Roots of Earth… is one of the most impressive debuts from a band since Cursed’s I. Evil and downright demonic in its approach to finding the middle ground between chaos and beauty, Full of Hell give us a sneak peek into a realm of misery and despair that is Roots Of Earth Are Consuming My Home.

"The white mare isn't leading my anywhere. Ash and soot are all that I have left."